Good grief
The older I get, the more I understand that grief is almost always in the room with us. There's a part of me that often wants to say "I hope you never have to sit in the pit of deep loss for as long as you live," but then I catch myself, because there's a paradox in that phrase and it’s this: if you make it to the end of your life never having grieved anyone (or anything), then your life probably ended well before old age, leaving others behind to grieve you. That, or you spent the whole time on some blissful/vague plane of existence I'm not equipped to comprehend.
Grief will do its thing with most of us at some point, and I don't think it's something we ever fully move through or leave behind. I think it's just something we learn to live with and maybe recontextualize over time, and if we're lucky and/or paying attention, it can transform us into more empathic, curious people than we were before we found ourselves up against the veil. I've been thinking a lot about grief lately (jk! I've been thinking a lot about it for as long as I can remember!), zooming in and out of my own experiences with it and trying, as ever, to get more comfortable with open-endedness. This week, the poetry of the late, great Andrea Gibson has been helping.
Some bitter/sweet (mostly sweet) things for you:
- In case you're unfamiliar with Andrea, they were an exquisite poet whose work I was unfamiliar with, too, until my friend Todd, who has great taste in everything, tuned me into it. Andrea died last week after a long illness, surrounded by dozens of loved ones, including people and pets and several ex-girlfriends... what a legendary way to go. Their deeply affecting poem about the afterlife might be one of the most simultaneously heartbreaking and comforting things you ever read.
- While we're on the topic, here's another gorgeous, tender bit of poetry about grief—this one read aloud by the poet (whose nom de plume is Scar Poetry), tending to the bruise even as it presses down.
- Switching now to grief's invisible twin, humor: everything Hanif Abdurraqib writes is beautiful, even when it's about basketball, which is a topic that otherwise puts me to sleep. This week, he wrote yet another beautiful piece in The New Yorker—not about basketball, but about the power and purpose of laughter in terrifying times. On top of that, he wrote a beautiful Instagram post about writing the beautiful piece. I beseech you to read both. Good medicine.
- Did you know about the longstanding friendship between Ireland and the Choctaw Nation? I didn't before this week, and now I'm glad I do.
- Want something pretty to look at? Let me put you on to the work of Amber Lauder, a Pennsylvania-based experimental artist/photographer whose process involves something called "film soup." The kids might say "it's giving Practical Magic," and if they did, they'd be right.
- File under Lighthearted Nonsense In The Realm Of Famous People: Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham seem to have mended some fences? Look, if those two crazy kids can patch things up, maybe we can forgive the neighbor with the loud music or the jerk who cut us off the other day. (Or maybe not! Maybe that dipshit's feet can itch forever!) Anyhow, come September at least we'll have some new (or new-sounding) tunes from the greatest to ever do it, plus one of her old flames. ;)
- Hey so I published another short poem, this one in Amethyst Review. It came about as part of a small daily "create-instead-of-consume" exercise I started doing last year, trying to cut anxious thoughts off at the pass each morning as I woke up and my mind started racing, somehow drunk on a cocktail of worry, grief, and dread before my feet even hit the floor. The exercise, or ritual or practice or whatever you want to call it, started off as a joke but it's... kind of working? And has been for eight or nine months now? Hop into the comments if you want (or shoot me a text if I've given you my number) and ask me anything about this. I mean it. Happy to share everything about it in case it works for you, too.
Til next week, y'all. <3
"Don’t believe that something that belongs to our pure realities could drop away and simply cease."
—Rainer Maria Rilke, 1913, in a letter to a friend after her brother's death
22 July 2025
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